Reading List

Organizing, Advocacy, Politics

Articles/papers

• Bernstein, Laura. "How To Talk To Your NIMBY Parents". The Urbanist, 2016-10-31. https://www.theurbanist.org/2016/10/31/how-to-talk-to-your-nimby-parents/
   
• Bosetti, Nicolas, and Sam Sims, the Centre for London. "STOPPED: Why People Oppose New Residential Developments in Their Back Yard." 20 July 2016. study examining people's reasons for resisting new housing development.  http://www.centreforlondon.org/publication/nimby-opposition/
   
• Darmawi, Fay. "How Affordable Housing Can Make a Name for Itself (and Why).” Affordable Housing Finance, March 19, 2014. [in which a a "HousingWiki" was proposed]. http://www.housingfinance.com/policy-legislation/how-affordable-housing-can-make-a-name-for-itself-and-why_o.
   
• Domhoff, William G. Who Rules America? (1st edition1967, updated in 2000 and 2009). See: Wikipedia: Who Rules America? 
  See also: Who Rules America? web site collecting Domhoff's writing on power dynamics. http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/local/
   
• Fahey, Anna. "A Blueprint for Better Housing Messages" SIghtline.org (April 5, 2017). http://www.sightline.org/2017/04/05/a-blueprint-for-better-housing-messages/.
   
• Fahey. Anna. "6 Tips for Talking Housing Solutions." Sightline.org (October 26, 2016). http://www.sightline.org/2016/10/26/6-tips-for-talking-housing-solutions/.
   
• Hankinson, Michael. "When Do Renters Behave Like Homeowners? High Rent, Price Anxiety, and NIMBYism." Harvard JCHS Working Paper, February 2017. http://www.jchs.harvard.edu/research/publications/when-do-renters-behave-homeowners-high-rent-price-anxiety-and-nimbyism.
   
• Lingle, Colin, and Anna Fahey. "Seattle's Housing Affordability & Livability Agenda in the News: A Sightline Institute Media Audit." Sightline.org, August 8, 2016. http://www.sightline.org/research_item/seattles-housing-affordability-livability-agenda-in-the-news/.
   
• Stein, Debra. "The Ethics of Housing and NIMBYism." Affordable Housing Finance,  February 2006.
   
• Smith, Noah. "The NIMBY Challenge." [tweeted as: "How YIMBYs should respond to the intellectual challenge mounted by the NIMBYs."]. Noahpinion, May 20, 2017. 
  http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-nimby-challenge.html.
   
• Stein, Debra. "Overcoming NIMBY Opposition Before It Stalls Your Project." 
  Multi-Housing News Magazine On-Line, December 29, 2008

Books

• Alinsky, Saul. Rules for Radicals (1971). full text, in ePub, PDF etc, at Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/RulesForRadicals. 
   
• Mathews, Joe. California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It (2010).
   
• Olson, Mancur. The Logic of Collective Action (1965). 

Land Use, Zoning, Planning

Articles

• Autor, David H., Christopher J. Palmer and Parag A. Pathak. "Housing Market Spillovers: Evidence from the End of Rent Control in Cambridge, Massachusetts."
   
• Bertolet, Dan."Exclusionary Zoning Robs Our Cities of Their Best Qualities." Sightline.org, 2016-04-20.
   
• George, Henry. "What the Railroad Will Bring Us" (1868).
   
• Glaeser, Edward. "Reforming land use regulations." Brookings Institute, April 24, 2017. https://www.brookings.edu/research/reforming-land-use-regulations/.
   
• Hills, Roderick M, Jr, and David Schleicher. "Can ‘Planning’ Deregulate land use?" Regulation (Cato Institute), Fall 2015.  https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/regulation/2015/9/regulation-v38n3-1.pdf,  
  "To overcome NIMBY politics and development constraints, urban areas should consider binding, comprehensive, citywide plans."
   
• Hsieh, Chang-Tai, and Enrico Moretti. "Housing Constraints and Spatial Misallocation." Working paper, May 18, 2017. http://eml.berkeley.edu//~moretti/growth.pdf.
  
  [earlier version:  Hsieh, Chang-Tai, and Enrico Moretti.  "Why Do Cities Matter? Local Growth and Aggregate Growth." NBER Working Paper 21154, 2015. http://www.nber.org/papers/w21154. Preprint:  http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1045&context=housing_law_and_policy.]
   
• Kent, T. J. The Urban General Plan.  At Internet Archive: [1]. 
  classic work, long used as a planning textbook, by influential Bay Area planner and educator T. J. Kent. 
   
• Kiefer, Matthew J. "The Social Functions of #NIMBYism" Harvard Graduate School of Design Magazine, 2008: a nuanced, relatively sympathetic examination of NIMBYism. Republished by Planetizen. 
   
• White, Gillian B. "How Zoning Laws Exacerbate Inequality." The Atlantic, Nov 23, 2015.  https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/11/zoning-laws-and-the-rise-of-economic-inequality/417360/. 
   
• White House. Housing Development Toolkit. September, 2016. https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/images/Housing_Development_Toolkit%20f.2.pdf. 

Peer-reviewed research 

• Fischel, William A. "Why Are There NIMBYs?" (2000). eminent US land-use/zoning scholar William provides a useful analysis of the NIMBY phenomenon from an economic perspective. https://www.dartmouth.edu/~wfischel/Papers/00-04.PDF.
   
• Glaeser, Edward L, Joseph Gyourko and Raven Saks. "Why is Manhattan So Expensive? Regulation and the Rise in Housing Prices." 
   
• Glaeser, Edward L, and Bryce A. Ward. "The causes and consequences of land use regulation: Evidence from Greater Boston." Journal of Urban Economics 65 (2009) 265–278.  DOI:10.1016/j.jue.2008.06.003.
  PDF from author: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/glaeser/files/the_causes_and_consequences_of_land_use_regulation_evidence_from_greater_boston_2009.pdf.
   
• Hall, Peter. "The Containment of Urban England." The Geographical Journal, Vol. 140, No. 3 (Oct., 1974), pp. 386-408. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1796533. [article summary of Hall's 1973 book of the same name].  
  https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_E90AYG2sPDelVqeFBVVDFobVk.
   
• Huang, Haifang, and Yao Tang. "Residential Land Use Regulation and the US Housing Price Cycle Between 2000 and 2009."
   
• Lens, Michael C., and Paavo Monkkonen. "Do Strict Land Use Regulations Make Metropolitan Areas More Segregated by Income?" Journal of the American Planning Association, Volume 82, 2016 - Issue 1. Published online 2015-12-28. DOI. 
  UCLA Working Paper: http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/Documents/areas/ctr/ziman/2015-04WP.pdf. 

• Mangin, John."The New Exclusionary Zoning." Stanford Law & Policy Review Vol. 25:91 (2014). https://journals.law.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/stanford-law-policy-review/print/2014/01/mangin_25_stan._l._poly_rev_91.pdf. 
   
• Parkhomenko, Andrii. "The Rise of Housing Supply Regulation in the U.S.: Local Causes and Aggregate Implications." Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and Barcelona GSE.  Working paper, January 5, 2017. https://www.andrii-parkhomenko.net/files/Parkhomenko_JMP.pdf.
          "Abstract: Regulatory restrictions on housing supply have been rising in recent decades in the U.S. and have become a major determinant of house prices. What are the implications of the rise in regulation for aggregate productivity, and for wage and house price dispersion across metropolitan areas?....I find that the rise in regulation accounts for 23% of the increase in wage dispersion and 85% of the increase in house price dispersion across metro areas from 1980 to 2007."
   
• Quigley, John M., and Steven Raphael. "Regulation and the High Cost of Housing in California."
   
• Rothwell, Jonathan, and Douglas S. Massey. "The Effect of Density Zoning on Racial Segregation in U.S. Urban Areas."
   
• Rothwell, Jonathan, and Douglas S. Massey.  "Density Zoning and Class Segregation in U.S. Metropolitan Areas."
   
• Schleicher, David. "City Unplanning". Yale Law Journal, __. A thorough review of US zoning's legal underpinnings, the economic dynamics produced, and some ways to counteract indesirable outcomes. PDF: http://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/1162_m41e7ifa.pdf.

Books

• Angotti, Tom [2016], and Sylvia Morse, Philip DePaolo, Peter Marcuse, Samuel Stein. Zoned Out! Race, Displacement, and City Planning in New York City. 2016.
  https://www.amazon.com/Zoned-Race-Displacement-City-Planning/dp/0996004130. 
   
• Avent, Ryan. The Gated City (2011).
   
• Babcock. The Zoning Game (1966). 
   
• Fischel, William A. Zoning Rules!: The Economics of Land Use Regulation (2015). 
   
• Fulton, William, and Paul Shigley. Guide to California Planning (4th edition, 2012). 3rd edition, 2005, available free on LibGen. https://libgen.pw/view.php?id=620298/ 
   
• George, Henry. Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth: The Remedy (1879).
   
• Hall, Peter. Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century (2002).
   
• Hirt, Sonia. Zoned in the USA: The Origins and Implications of American Land-Use Regulation (Cornell University Press, 2014).
   
• Levy, John M. Contemporary Urban Planning (9th Edition, 2010).
   
• Marcuse, Peter, and David Madden. In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis. 2016. https://www.amazon.com/Defense-Housing-Politics-Crisis/dp/1784783544. 
   
• McHarg, Ian L. Design With Nature (1969). 
  "pioneered the concept of ecological planning...continues to be one of the most widely celebrated books on landscape architecture and land-use planning." -Wikipedia.
   
• Shoup, Donald. The High Cost of Free Parking. 
   
• Toll, Seymour. Zoned American (1969). Outstanding legal/cultural study of the origins and development of US zoning practices.

Resource Guides

• 100 Essential Books of Planning, from American Planning Association (2009). 

Housing

Articles/papers

• Badger, Emily. "How big cities that restrict new housing harm the economy." Washington Post, July 25, 2014. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/07/25/how-big-cities-that-restrict-new-housing-harm-the-economy/.
   
• Bauer, Cathering. Modern Housing. 1934. 
  [page scans available at Internet Archive]. 
  A landmark work focusing on European social housing post-WWI, by one the most influential housing reformers of the 20th Century. 
   
• Beyer, Scott. "Tokyo's Affordable Housing Strategy: Build, Build, Build." Forbes, 12 Aug 2016. https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottbeyer/2016/08/12/tokyos-affordable-housing-strategy-build-build-build/#6ec6182448d5. 
   
• Bosetti, Nicolas, and Sam Sims, the Centre for London. "STOPPED: Why People Oppose New Residential Developments in Their Back Yard." 20 July 2016. An excellent study examining people's reasons for resisting new housing development.  ISBN: 978‑0‑9932416‑7‑3.
   
• Boston Globe Editorial Board. "Obama's YIMBY moment" 2016-10-12.
   
• Boston Globe Editorial Board. "Make room for Granny, and other zoning fixes." 2016-05-27.
   
• Boston Globe Editorial Board. "How Cambridge and Lexington invented new housing." Boston Globe, 2016-05-01.
   
• California Legislative Analyst's Office. "Perspectives on Helping Low-Income Californians Afford Housing." 2016-02-09.
   
• California Legislative Analyst's Office. "California’s High Housing Costs: Causes and Consequences." 2015-03-17.
   
• Cortright, Joe. "Urban myth busting: New rental housing and median-income households." City Observatory, 17.2.2016
  http://cityobservatory.org/urban-myth-busting-new-rental-housing-and-median-income-households/.
   
• Cutler, Kim-Mai. "How Burrowing Owls Lead To Vomiting Anarchists (Or SF’s Housing Crisis Explained)." TechCrunch. 2014-04-14.
   
• Durning, Alan, et al. Legalizing Inexpensive Housing (article series). Sightline.org. 
   
• Hertz, Daniel. "Housing can’t be a good investment and affordable.". City Observatory, 2016-07-20.
   
• Jacobus, Rick."Why We Must Build." Shelterforce, 2016-03-09.
   
• Khouri, Andrew. "As new apartments flood downtown L.A., landlords offer sweet deals." LA Times, 3 August 2016. http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-downtown-apartments-20160719-snap-story.html.
   
• McCormick, Kathleen. "Gentle Infill: Boomtowns are making room for skinny homes, granny flats, and other affordable housing." Land Lines (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy), July 2016. https://law.wustl.edu/landuselaw/Articles/Gentle%20Infill.pdf.
   
• Ramos, Dante. "To avoid housing nightmare, say ‘yes in my back yard’". Boston Globe, 2016-07-24.
   
• Whitehouse.gov. Housing Development Toolkit. 2016-09-26.
   
• Woetzel, Jonathan, Jan Mischke, Shannon Peloquin, Daniel Weisfeld. "Closing California’s housing gap." McKinsey Global Institute, October 2016
  http://www.mckinsey.com/global-themes/urbanization/closing-californias-housing-gap.
   
• Woetzel. Jonathan, Sangeeth Ram, Jan Mischke, Nicklas Garemo, and Shirish Sankhe. "Tackling the world’s affordable housing challenge." McKinsey Global Institute, October 2014. http://www.mckinsey.com/global-themes/urbanization/tackling-the-worlds-affordable-housing-challenge.

• Yglesias, Matthew. The Rent is Too Damn High.[ebook].
   
• Zuk, Miriam, and Karen Chapple. "Housing Production, Filtering and Displacement: Untangling the Relationships." Institute for Governmental Studies (University of California) Research Brief, May 2016.

Peer-reviewed research 

• Chapple, Karen, John V. Thomas, Dena Belzer and Gerald Autler. "Fueling the Fire: Information Technology and Housing Price Appreciation in the San Francisco Bay Area." 
  Housing Policy Debate 15(2): 347-383.  (2004)
  http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10511482.2004.9521505.
   
• Rosenthal, Stuart S. "Are Private Markets and Filtering a Viable Source of Low-Income Housing? Estimates from a 'Repeat Income' Model." American Economic Review, Vol. 104, No. 2, Feb 2014 (pp. 687-706). 
  DOI: 10.1257/aer.104.2.687.  
  Preprint, June 2013: http://faculty.maxwell.syr.edu/rosenthal/recent%20papers/Is_Filtering_a_Viable_Source_of_Low-Income_Housing_%206_18_13.pdf.

Books

• Angotti, Tom [2016], and Sylvia Morse, Philip DePaolo, Peter Marcuse, Samuel Stein. Zoned Out! Race, Displacement, and City Planning in New York City. 2016.
  https://www.amazon.com/Zoned-Race-Displacement-City-Planning/dp/0996004130.
   
• Bratt, Rachel G, Michael E. Stone, and Chester Hartman, editors. A Right to Housing: Foundation for a New Social Agenda (2006).
   
• Davies, Colin. The Prefabricated Home (2005).
   
• Glaeser, Edward L., and Joseph Gyourko. Rethinking Federal Housing Policy: How to Make Housing Plentiful and Affordable. (American Enterprise Institute, 2008). 
   
• Hohmann, Jessie.The Right to Housing: Laws, Concepts, Possibilities. (2013).
   
• Heben, Andrew. Tent City Urbanism: From Self-Organized Camps to Tiny House Villages (2014). 
   
• Marcuse, Peter, and David Madden. In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis. 2016. https://www.amazon.com/Defense-Housing-Politics-Crisis/dp/1784783544. 
   
• Riis, Jacob A. How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (1890).
   
• Schwartz, Alex F. Housing Policy in the United States. (3rd Edition, 2014). ISBN: 978-0415836500.
   
• Tighe, J. Rosie. The Affordable Housing Reader. (2012).
   
• Turner, John F. C., editor. Freedom to Build : Dweller Control of the Housing Process (1972).
   
• Turner, John F. C. Housing By People: Towards Autonomy in Building Environments (1976). 
   
• Vale, Lawrence J.. From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors. (Harvard University Press, 2007).
   
• Walllis, Allan D. Wheel Estate: The Rise and Decline of Mobile Homes (1997).
   
• Wright, Gwendolyn. Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (1983).
• Wurster, Catherine Bauer [bio]. “Modern Housing.” Houghton Mifflin, 1934. PDF full text: [1]. (assembled by YIMBYwiki from page scans at Internet Archive). 
  "Catherine Krouse Bauer Wurster (1905-964) was a prominent American public housing advocate and educator of city planners and urban planners. A leading member of the "housers," a group of planners who advocated affordable housing for low-income families, she dramatically changed social housing practice and law in the United States. Wurster's influential book Modern Housing was published by Houghton Mifflin Company in 1934 and is regarded as a classic in the field." -Wikipedia. 
   

Urbanism

Articles/papers

• Alexander, Christopher. A city is not a tree. (1965).  [suggested by Matin Barner]
   
• Marcuse, Peter. "Gentrification, Abandonment, and Displacement: Connections, Causes, and Policy Responses in New York City." Urban Law Annual ; Journal of Urban and Contemporary Law, Volume 28 (January 1985). http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1396&context=law_urbanlaw.
   
• Mumford, Lewis. What is a City? article in Architectural Record, 1937.

Books

• Alexander, Christopher. A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (1977).
   
• Calthorpe, Peter. The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community, and the American Dream. (1993).
   
• Glaeser, Edward, The Triumph of the City (2011). 
   
• Goodman, Robert. After the Planners (1973).
   
• Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961).
  • Ch.1 Introduction, & Ch. 2 "The Use of Sidewalks".
     

 

• Lydon, Mike. Tactical Urbanism: Short-term Action for Long-term Change (2015). 
   
• Montgomery, Charles. Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design (2014). 
   
• Moretti, Enrico. The New Geography of Jobs. (2012). 
   
• Mumford, Lewis.The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (1961). 
   
• Sennett, Richard, ed. Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities (1969).
   
• Smith, Neil. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (1996).
   
• Speck, Jeff. Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time.

Resource Guides / Bibliographies

• Zuk, Miriam Zuk; Ariel H. Bierbaum, Karen Chapple, Karolina Gorska, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Paul Ong, and Trevor Thomas. "Gentrification, Displacement and the Role of Public Investment: A Literature Review". Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (Working Paper), August 24, 2015.  http://www.frbsf.org/community-development/publications/working-papers/2015/august/gentrification-displacement-role-of-public-investment/
  (funded by the California Air Resources Board as part of the project "Developing a New Methodology for Analyzing Potential Displacement."). 
   

San Francisco / Bay Area history and issues

Articles/papers

• Chapple, Karen, John V. Thomas, Dena Belzer and Gerald Autler. "Fueling the Fire: Information Technology and Housing Price Appreciation in the San Francisco Bay Area." 
  Housing Policy Debate 15(2): 347-383.  (2004)
  http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10511482.2004.9521505. 
   
• Cutler, Kim-Mai. "How Burrowing Owls Lead To Vomiting Anarchists (Or SF’s Housing Crisis Explained)." TechCrunch. 2014-04-14.
   
• Domhoff, William G. "Why San Francisco Is (or Used to Be) Different: Progressive Activists and Neighborhoods Had a Big Impact." Who Rules America, November 2011. http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/local/san_francisco.html.
   
• Hogan, Mark. "Living in a Fool’s Paradise: San Francisco must change." Boom California. June 25, 2014. https://boomcalifornia.com/2014/06/25/living-in-a-fools-paradise/. 

Books

• Bagwell, Beth. Oakland The Story of a City (1982; 2nd edition 2012). 
   
• Brechin, Gray. Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (2001). 
   
• DeLeon, Richard. Left coast city: progressive politics in San Francisco, 1975-1991 (1992).
   
• Hartman, Chester. City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco (2002). 
   
• Margolin, Malcolm. The Ohlone Way: Indian life in the San Francisco-Monterey Bay Area.(1978; Berkeley: Heyday Books; 25th Anniversary Ed. with a new Afterword, 2002).
• Polledri, Paolo. Visionary San Francisco (1990).
   
• Self, Robert O. American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland. (Princeton University Press, 2003). 

Homelessness

Books

• Anderson, Nels. The Hobo.
   
• Blau, Joel. The Visible Poor: Homelessness in the United States.
   
• Feldman, Leonard C. Citizens without Shelter: Homelessness, Democracy, and Political Exclusion. (Cornell University Press, 2006). 
   
• Heben, Andrew. Tent City Urbanism: From Self-Organized Camps to Tiny House Villages.
   
• Gowan, Teresa. Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders: Homeless in San Francisco. (University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 
   
• Hailey, Charlie. Camps: A Guide to 21st-Century Space. (MIT Press, 2009).
   
• ____ . Campsite: Architectures of Duration and Place. 2008.
   
• Hopper, Kim. Reckoning With Homelessness. (Cornell University Press, 2002).   
     
• Katz. The Undeserving Poor (1st edition 1989). 
   
• Kerouac, Jack. "The Hobo in America", in Lonesome Traveller. 
   
• Kusmer, Kenneth L.. Down and Out, on the Road: The Homeless in American History. Oxford University Press, 2001.  
   
• London, Jack. The Road (1903). 
   
• Okin, Robert L. Silent Voices: People with Mental Disorders on the Street.
   
• Piven, Francis. Regulating the Poor.
   
• Quigley, John M, Stephen Raphael, and Eugene Smolensky. "Homelessness in California." Public Policy Institute of California, 2001. http://www.ppic.org/publication/homelessness-in-california/. 
•  
• Rossi, Peter R. Down and Out in America. 1993.
   
• Willse, Craig. The Value of Homelessness: Managing Surplus Life in the United States. (University of Minnesota Press, 2015). 

See Also

Online Publications